As I got a little older, though, I found out from family—not from my schoolteachers—that many never wanted to leave at all. That they often had less than twenty-four hours to plan their departure, and the stakes were not this-job-or-that-job; they were sometimes life or death. For these families, this Great Migration was not a careful and calculated choice—it was terrorism. It was a sudden expulsion. And as much as it had the power to lift Black families up, the journey north had the power to break them down.
